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subjectivity. Thus, the interviews were conducted taking into the following
characteristics: reproducibility; credibility; and transparency [9].
A convenient sample of eight PhD Engineering students was chosen considering
their age, gender, background, career paths and non-academic experience, their PhD
academic stage as well as nationality. All the invited participants accepted the
challenge to take part of this study. The students came from different scientific areas
and their doctoral study fields range from human engineering issues till
entrepreneurship, showing the multidisciplinarity that is required in research, where
different perspectives are integrated in order to solve the engineering problems [10].
The interviews were conducted according to the following topics: understanding
mentor/supervisor concepts, main role of a mentor, gender and longevity of mentoring
relationship, quality of communication, cost/benefit in mentoring relationships, trust,
formality and power of mentoring in work development were queried and analysed.
The individual authorized interviews had, on average, duration of approximately 30
minutes. For data analysis, all the recorded interviews were transcribed, checked for
accuracy against original recordings and validated by each of the participants. The
results presented in this work correspond to a carefully translation so that the
interpretation is maintained. For the qualitative data analysis of the semi-structured
interview (organization and systematization of data) the authors made use of the
software WebQDA [11].
As stated by Richard E. Caruso: mentoring "…is the third most powerful
relationship for influencing human behaviour (after the family and couple
relationships) if it is working" [12]. Mentoring can be considered as a relationship that
can affect everyone involved, mentor, mentee/student and organizations. Therefore, it
can be seen as a relationship where everyone involved has benefits (or cost). Quality
of communication could be considered one of key characteristics that contribute to a
mentoring success. Without an open communication, active listening, and ability to
connect, difficultly a mentoring relationship can be successfully accomplished. As a
direct consequence of the quality of the mentor-mentee relationship, the achieved
benefits could go far beyond the initial purpose of the relationship. In this way, the
power of mentoring in work development could be stated and analysed.
4
Data Analysis
4.1
Project Definitions and Category System
The eight semi-structured interviews data were transcript in *.docx format files. In
searching for similarities and/or differences in the given responses, the data was
divided in different attributes such as: age (less than 30, 30 to 40, 40 to 45), gender
(female, male), background (engineering, others), career paths (industrial, academic
experiences), their PhD academic stage (initial, middle, final stages), nationality
(Portuguese, others) and personality. The dimension considered is the R.Q. itself
divided into three categories: (1) information exchange, (2) formality, and (3) power
of mentoring in career development. It was necessary, for some of the defined
categories, the identification of sub-categories as illustrated in Figure 5. As an
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